The heavy snow is causing misery for millions, but there's only joy in a
country home blanketed in white

Bliss to wake up in weather like yesterday’s, isn’t it? It is for me, because I live in a cottage that is dark, dark, dark like the gates of Mordor and snow makes amazing light. Better than sunshine and a million times better than that whole depressing year of unending rain.

A snowy day is also bliss because the dogs love snow and it’s cleaner than mud, but I don’t have to take the dogs out. (I don’t have to take them ever, actually. That was the deal. If somebody wants dogs, they can have dogs, so long as they walk them and pick up after them.)

Cottages look well enough in the summer in a normal year, when doors and windows are left open and the rose bushes in the garden seem to be blooming in the house. But when was the last normal year? Last summer, roses rotted on the stalk; tulips wilted in the grass. Last summer was so vile and sodden that – for the first time in decades – I wanted to move to a flat. In a town. With flagstone pavements and gutters and drainpipes and “made” roads instead of “unmade” roads with potholes a foot deep and water-courses running across them.

Cottages come into their own from Advent to Twelfth Night. Their low ceilings and little windows look well throughout the whole Christmas period, theatrically so when candles are lit and fires crackle and everything smells of cinnamon. But during the bleak and gloomy months of late January and February, cottage-dwellers become cribbed and confined and start to go stir-crazy. I can’t imagine how hard it must be to live above the Arctic Circle and have six months of white nights and six months of dark.

My windows upstairs are all at floor level, tucked under the eaves. In order to scrounge as much daylight as possible the walls, ceilings and blinds are white, but green fields, grey skies and black hedging dull interior daylight down. Snow-white light absolutely jerks one into life. Even under a leaden sky (it’s still falling), snow makes a shattering difference: white light is uplifting. So I seriously enjoy the mood-altering prettification that follows snowfall. In the language of the poetic descriptors (mostly in French) on women’s make-up tubes and bottles: I feel visibly brightened, I feel touched with radiance, revivified, renewed. I spring from bed.

Actually, I did spring from bed yesterday morning, but I crept back into it after being up for a couple of hours, shuddering with cold. I couldn’t get warm. We don’t put the heating on until four o’clock; don’t light the fire until the dogs have had their evening walk. It is beyond cold ever since I threw all the moth-eaten carpets out of the house while tidying up for the wedding, and I haven’t the heart to restore them. And there is an electric blanket on my bed, which is cosy, even while the wind whistles through the holes in the floorboards.

I have decided I have no need or reason to go out. Nor any way to get anywhere, apart from on foot. My neighbour with an appointment across the county borrowed the elderly Range Rover, so my husband drove my car to Wyn the Shop because I refused to. A VW Beetle, being low to the ground, is unhandy for a) flooding and b) snow so I’m certainly not driving it anywhere. I wouldn’t even accompany him to the village, in dread lest my massive post-Christmas weight gain should cause us to fishtail down Cemetery Hill.

I read this week that some sporting baroness with an interest in the Olympic legacy (Baroness Campbell of Loughborough – I just left my bed briefly to look for Wednesday’s paper) is complaining that children of 11 are failing to learn to jump or run or throw and catch balls “because of a lack of specialist PE teachers in primary schools”. I stared unbelieving at that paragraph for five minutes, and I stare at it now. I mean, I’m not going to move until dinnertime myself. But a) I’m not a child, b) I’m not bringing any children up right now and c) I’m not a primary schoolteacher, trained or untrained.